I am proud to endorse my fellow independent candidates Andre Easton, and Justin Filip, who are also running for Congress this year.
Like my campaign, both candidates are clearly opposing the apartheid state of Israel, campaigning to end the genocide in Gaza, and calling for an end to all military aid to Israel. Both are calling for universal public healthcare and taxes on the rich.
Most importantly, they are running independent of the two most powerful parties of global capitalism: the warmongering billionaire-backed Democratic and Republican parties.
Andre Easton is on the ballot for the November election in New York’s 15th Congressional District, in the Bronx. He is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and is running openly and clearly as a socialist. His campaign is highlighting the fact that working people in the Bronx have been impoverished under the Democratic Party. His principal opponent is vile, warmongering incumbent Democrat Ritchie Torres, who has received $2.6 million from AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACs and affiliated donors throughout his five-year career. Torres has been an unwavering cheerleader for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. Like my opponent, incumbent genocidal Democrat Adam Smith, Torres has voted for tens of billions of dollars for the genocide in Gaza and to ban United Nations food aid to the Palestinian people.
Andre is calling for full legal status for all undocumented immigrants, for taxes on the rich, and for housing built for people’s needs, not corporate profit.
Justin Filip is a member of the Green Party. He is the Secretary of the Pacific Green Party and the co-chair of the Eugene chapter of the Pacific Green Party. He is running against incumbent Democrat Valerie Hoyle who, like Adam Smith and Ritchie Torres, voted to fund the genocide in Gaza.
Justin’s campaign is calling for the abolishing of ICE and replacing it with an “Office of Citizenship, Refugees, and Immigration Services,” which would reunite families separated under ICE and provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Justin is also calling for an end to the “war on drugs” that has had a devastating impact on working and poor people across nations.
Donald Trump was elected and then re-elected because of the historic betrayals by the Democratic Party, and their refusal to do anything in support of the American working class. Under Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden, and with majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, the Democratic Party has overseen a devastating cost-of-living crisis, dismantled social programs, launched military assaults against several nations, funded a genocide, and ensured the blocking of universal healthcare and refused to allow even a strong public option for healthcare. Every Democratic member in the House, except for Rashida Tlaib, voted to break the railroad workers’ strike in 2022. The national minimum wage is still at a shockingly low $7.25/hour. The Democratic Party did not even repeal Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or make the Affordable Care Act enhanced tax subsidies permanent when they had a majority in both houses of Congress and Biden was in the White House.
The genocide in Gaza started under Biden, and 173 House Democrats voted to send over $26 billion for the genocide in 2024. Congressmembers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have also voted to fund Israeli weapons like Iron Dome with the claim that they are defensive weapons, even though it has been fully clear that no aspect of the Israeli genocidal and murderous apparatus is defensive.
It is not a coincidence that the strategy of candidates running in the Democratic Party to push the party to the left and win antiwar and working-class victories has utterly failed.
The fundamental question facing working people is how to win substantive progressive change for the working class, let alone replacing capitalism with a socialist world. All of history shows the only way to do this is to build mass movements with leadership prepared to carry out a militant class struggle against the capitalist class. Our recent decade-long experience, when I was the independent socialist on the Seattle City Council, also proves this as the way forward. As an independent working-class elected representative, I used my office relentlessly for ten years to build movements to win historic victories for working people. I worked unhesitatingly with any Democratic Party politician willing to fight alongside me. But those instances were very few. The Democratic Party overwhelmingly opposed the demands working people and my office brought forward. Going to class war against the billionaire class required us to also expose the Democratic Party politicians and force their hand. By using a class struggle based fighting strategy that included exposing the Democratic politicians, working people and my office were able to win the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, unprecedented renters’ rights, the world’s first and only ban on caste-based discrimination outside South Asia, and publicly-funded free abortion.
The recent Democratic Party primary election victories of the candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York and Colorado are rekindling the idea that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left. The Democratic primary victories are undoubtedly a decisive repudiation of the Zionist and pro-genocide agenda and a reflection of working-class anger at the cost-of-living crisis. The victories show that working people can defeat the representatives of the warmongering system. I sincerely hope that the new DSA candidates will stand up to the pressures that are about to land on them. However, this will not be possible without going to war against the Democratic and Republican parties and the billionaires they represent. The basis for working together with any politician in Washington D.C. should be whether they are willing to join in the fight for concrete victories against the genocide and imperialist war, and for working-class needs. Even with the best of intentions, putting cordial relations with other Democratic politicians, including the “progressive” Democrats, ahead of the working class and the antiwar movement will lead only to betrayals of working people. History has repeatedly shown this.
Instead, any elected representative who intends to fight for the working class will need to use their office to build mass movements of working people to bring relentless pressure to bear on the establishment. They will need to organize to bring bills actually to a vote: bills like ending all military aid to Israel and universal public healthcare funded by taxing the rich. Such a fight will expose individual careerist politicians to the light of day. They will need to face head-on the “reputational and relational harm” that AOC has been unwilling to risk with the Democratic Party leaders.
The first and minimal test of this will be if they refuse to vote for Hakeem Jeffries or any other warmongering, Zionist Democrat as House Speaker if the Democratic Party wins a majority. I have pledged that if elected I would absolutely refuse to support Jeffries, and I hope other socialist candidates running this year will join me in this commitment to working people and the antiwar movement.
A majority of American working people are disenchanted by the politics on offer by both Trump and the Republican Party, on the one hand, and by the Democratic Party, on the other. A recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that “political disillusionment seems only to be deepening.” The survey estimates that only 26 percent of voters are happy with the Democratic Party and only 33 percent with the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of respondents under the age of 30 are angry with both parties. Millions of people have marched in the No Kings protests and hundreds of thousands have protested against ICE agents in cities across the nation. Masses of working people are looking for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the forever wars and an end to the unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. But there is no leadership on offer from the organizers of No Kings other than to vote, once again, for the rotten Democratic Party which has repeatedly sold us out.
The chasm between the widespread anger and the avenues for fightback is as wide as it has been in recent years. Despite the openings for strike actions and mass civil disobedience against Trump’s ICE, the overwhelming majority of the labor leadership has not only refused to mobilize but has also actively discouraged striking, as the labor leadership did in the leadup to the January 23rd actions against ICE terror in Minneapolis. Prominent labor leader Shawn Fain, the President of the United Auto Workers union, was a major cheerleader for the campaign of Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024, turning a deaf ear to the unprecedented discontent among working people.
Rebuilding a militant labor movement is crucial, as is building a new party for the working class. These two tasks go together. Running independent socialist campaigns, rooted in the working class, is a necessary step forward. Andre’s and Justin’s campaigns, alongside mine, point toward what is urgently needed: a new mass party of the working class prepared to go to war against the billionaires and their political servants.